


Attenuate

by horchata



Category: The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27198448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horchata/pseuds/horchata
Summary: "We're not sure where it begins," Ms. Dorell said, "but we believe it starts in the blood."
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2020





	Attenuate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hmweasley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hmweasley/gifts).



> If you wanna get in the spirit of things, [the full text of "The Lottery" can be found here](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery).
> 
> Thank you to [hypocorism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypocorism) for the lookover.
> 
> And now... science:
>
>> _An attenuated vaccine is a vaccine created by reducing the virulence of a pathogen, but still keeping it viable (or "live"). Attenuation takes an infectious agent and alters it so that it becomes harmless or less virulent. These vaccines contrast to those produced by "killing" the virus (inactivated vaccine)._  
> 

"We're not sure where it begins," Ms. Dorell said, "but we believe it starts in the blood."

\---

"D'you think they'll paint it, John?"

Ms. Dorell looked up from her shepherd's pie. It had been a very long winter in the schoolhouse, bitterly cold, and the spring had just begun to sneak its tendrils through the slush. Today's lesson on the resiliency of plants had been met with bright, delighted eyes as she and her twelve students trod wet shoes through the gray and icy mud to find the tiniest pinpricks of green, defiantly opposing Monday's brief snow. 

It had been such a hopeful moment, she had decided then and there to treat herself to a warm dinner she did not make, in their diner-cum-gossip house. Ms. Dorell expected to be able to round out the stories she heard from her children, eavesdroppers every one of them, by softly absorbing the idle chatter of the town's prolific gossips, but she should have known. Spring brings summer, and a late spring meant summer would feel early. It feels earlier and earlier each year. 

"Don't think they'll do a damn thing, Marge," John Graves said, ripping a bite of his tough dinner rolls with his teeth. "You know only Summers likes to touch it."

Marge huffed, dragging her rag across the counter. "It's just been unsightly since the one year it rained. If you want my opinion--"

"Already _know_ your opinion, Marge."

" _We should_ have postponed," she continued, raising her voice. "It's a matter of pride."

"Matter of pride," John muttered. "You sound like Old Man Warner. Ain't no pride in it, just the way it is. An old raggedy black box that nobody wants to touch with hands or a brush. What d'you think, Miss?"

Ms. Dorell realized rather abruptly she had taken to staring, and her two subjects were now staring right back.

"Me?"

John made a show of turning his head this way and that. Nobody else here, it said. Marge put her hand on her hip and spoke up, impatient. "Yes, _Ms._ Dorell, what do you think of the box? It really could use another coat, couldn't it?"

Ms. Dorell set down her fork and thought before answering. "I suppose there's some kind of gravity that comes with aged things, more so when the look of them matches."

"Ha! She don't think it'll get painted, neither."

"Miserable, both of you," said Marge, refilling John's water. "I just think it should look nice, is all. It should _match_ the way we think about it."

"Look mighty different man to man that way, Marge."

"Yes," Ms. Dorell agreed. "For me, as an example, given the choice it would look rather invisible, almost as if it wasn't even there. Much like my appetite, I'm afraid. Do you mind if I take the rest home?"

The rest of the transaction was rather quiet, rather dour, the passing of bills and parcels. Ms. Dorell's hands shook only enough for her to notice, and not enough to spill any bit of the potatoes or meat as she scraped them into the little box. Spring was late and she had gotten complacent, misplaced herself in the year. 

It must still have been noticeable. "Poor-ell Dorell," Marge said, with the singsong voice of someone placating a spooked cat. 

"Let her be, Marge." said John. "She sees 'em more than you do."

"Quite right," said Ms. Dorell, and picked up her change so she could leave. She would begin tomorrow. It was time to get everyone ready.

"It's just the look of it's important, John," Ms. Dorell heard faintly through the window, walking away. "It means something."

\---

"The blood?" Bobby Watson asked.

"Yes," said Ms. Dorell, turning around. She brushed her chalk from her fingers. She had just finished writing six new words on the board: _Fear. Mind. Control. Flee. Freeze. Beg._

"Why there?"

"Well," she said, measured. "When the brain is frightened, we believe it releases a sort of signal to the body, to the limbs. It heightens senses and begins a preparation to move, or to stay very still, or perhaps to beg. You might have felt those things before, if someone startled you. This signal travels in our bodies, and we believe it might be in the blood."

"Makes sense," said Baxter Martin. He leaned back in his chair just like his older brother had years before, hooking his feet in the legs. "There's blood everywhere in your body."

"Precisely so," Ms. Dorell said. "And so we believe the signal is interpreted differently in different people. Most don't bother to notice and it becomes something that happens to them. Their _mind_ " -- and she touches the word on the board -- "loses its _control_. And then they freeze, flee, or beg. This can lead to more fear, or a more dramatic reaction."

\---

He'd run to the schoolhouse, which Ms. Dorell should have expected.

Jack Watson sat in his father's chair, sobbing. She couldn't see his face. For a moment, she pretended she was years away, deep in the comforting cold of winter. They had the same tall frame, Jack and his father, the same shoulders. Ms. Dorell closed her eyes in the wave of grief and relief and took a shuddering breath, the only kind that would come to her for several long moments. She leaned in the doorway and came back to herself. To lose them both in one day--

She closed the door behind her. She locked it. She looped around the windows of the one-room schoolhouse and pulled the curtains closed along the panes of glass left open for light in yesterday's sun. The air in the schoolhouse was dank, damp, thick and humid in the sickly way things got when it rained in the summer. Jack was choking on it. 

She didn't approach him. She thought about all the things people said to her when it was her father, when he'd stood in the clearing, when she'd fell in the wet, black dirt. _Fair as always. So brave, your father. Took it like a man, like the man he was._ She'd worn her long baking apron and remembered burning it, after, when the blood wouldn't wash out.

"I wanted to kill them. I wanted them to die."

Ms. Dorell nodded to his back. She nodded and kept nodding. Yes, that was how she had felt, too.

Jack didn't say much more. Ms. Dorell walked closer, heel first. Heel, toe; heel, toe; loud so Jack could hear her. His hands clenched in his hair. They were red, bruised. They were bruised all along the outer fleshy sides. One of his pinky fingers seemed bent the wrong way.

She didn't touch him, but she touched his father's desk. It was cracked along its weakest part. One of its drawers had been thrown against the wall, chalk strewn on the floor. The slate his father preferred was broken, too; one piece on the floor, one in Jack's lap. 

"If I-- if-- I _couldn't._ " 

Ms. Dorell hummed. Jack flung himself into her stomach.

"I was such a coward. I couldn't throw it after all."

"It looked like you did," she said. She touched the back of his head.

Jack gripped her shirt harder with his ruined hands. Ms. Dorell rubbed his shoulder. He _wailed._

After, they both pushed his father's desk into the far corner. They covered it with books. They rearranged the desks. Ms. Dorell walked him home.

\---

"It is these three responses that comprise our lesson for the day: fleeing, freezing, begging. We set about the difficult and honorable task of training ourselves away from these crutches. It will do us good to be able to take our brains to better places, to tell ourselves more acceptable stories in moments when our fear threatens to control us and cause us weakness."

Nancy Hutchinson looked up at her with curiosity. "You can do that?"

"Yes, absolutely," Ms. Dorell smiled. "It is only through a mastery of the mind that we achieve maturity. And stop feeling so afraid of monsters under our beds."

\---

"Mom says she thinks it'll be her this year."

Ms. Dorell crouched next to Nancy at the base of the tree, where the young girl had been methodically ripping up tufts of new grass. It was unusual to find Nancy alone during recess. She was a popular girl with many friends in the school. If she was alone, she must have engineered it to be so, just so Ms. Dorell could find her. Ms. Dorell thought for a moment about the utility of pretending she didn't know what Nancy was talking about, but perhaps her preparatory lessons had been less subtle than she'd thought. 

"She can't know," Ms. Dorell said, eventually, but everyone knew Tessie Hutchinson was a bit odd, a bit off. She'd always had these premonitions. Always veered a bit left, like the wheels of her cart were unbalanced. She'd made good predictions about the crops year to year, and always seemed to be right. Tessie'd known about the bore beetles in the wood, guessed about the well, could always tell when a bad storm was coming. Forgetful, Tessie was; always a bit too eager to object to things, but Bill loved her and the town listened when she brought things up, most of the time.

"She knew about Mr. Watson last year," Nancy said, this time pulling up roots.

Ms. Dorell blew air out of her mouth. "So she did," she agreed. She sat next to Nancy. "What do you think?"

"I think she's right," said Nancy. "I think she's right, like every other time she's been right, about my loose teeth, and Henry, and Davy, and the grasshoppers, and Mr. Allen's table."

Ms. Dorell thought Tessie'd be right, too. Ms. Dorell remembered the year her father had drawn lots, the year after her mother had died. It was just the two of them, picking wood. She remembered how her father had taught her to feel the difference between the different grains of wood, to pick the one with the smoother feel, until she could do it right every single time, no matter how many chips were in a box. If she rubbed her fingertips together she could still imagine it. She remembered having to throw her first stone. That was when she'd decided she'd be the next schoolteacher. The schoolteacher, the doctor -- they didn't pick chips and they didn't throw stones. 

"What will you do, if she's right?" Ms. Dorell asked.

Nancy teared up, and turned so her back was to the wide field where the children were running. "I don't know," she said, with the air of someone who knew exactly what she would do and did not want to admit it.

"Hm," Ms. Dorell said, standing up. She straightened her skirts out and brushed off the loose blades of grass. "The way I see it, you have two choices."

Nancy sniffled, looked up at her.

"None of that, Nancy," Ms. Dorell said. Nancy closed her eyes. Ms Dorell rehearsed what she was going to say in her head, heard her father talk to her, and shook her head side to side. Nancy saw and misinterpreted, wiped her eyes furiously. Some mud smudged on her cheek from where she had viciously ripped up the grass. Ms. Dorell tapped her own cheek to show Nancy, and Nancy scrubbed her face. The mud stayed. Nancy looked ready to cry once again.

"Listen here," Ms. Dorell said, sternly, "you have two choices. You can either miss, or you can aim true."

Nancy gasped. Her hand wiped more dirt into the tears on her cheeks. 

"Either way." Ms. Dorell handed Nancy her handkerchief. "Either way, Nancy, you should spend the rest of what's left of the spring in the field with everyone else, playing catch. Playing the best games of catch you have ever played. By the end of the year, you should know how to throw a ball exactly where you want it to go."

She offered Nancy her hand, and Nancy took it. Ms Dorell carefully, firmly, pulled Nancy to her feet. "Now," she smiled, "go play."

\---

At the mention of monsters, some older children in the class giggled. A few of the younger ones seemed to look at their desks with shame. Ms. Dorell steadied herself with a quick, brisk sigh; a straightening of her shoulders.

"Please, let's begin with a demonstration. Would anyone care to try mastering a fear?"

Several of the older children raised their hands, and only one of the younger ones: Peter Allen.

Ms. Dorell bent her knees to bring herself level with Peter's desk. She looked into Peter's eyes. "What are you afraid of?"

"Nightmares," Peter said. Ms. Dorell hummed for him to continue. "Most snakes, except the little ones. Spiders, um... people with -- with axes."

Ms. Dorell smiled, nodded. Peter's father was a carpenter. Peter's father was a drunk. 

She stood. "Well, Peter, we can begin with one of those fears, something small." There was always one child afraid of what she could prepare ahead of time. The unnatural; it always frightened the younger children. She placed on Peter's desk an overturned tall glass on a sturdy piece of cardboard, in which, in the upper corner, there was a brown, long-legged spider.

Peter stiffened. Next to Peter, sweet Nancy had gathered the fabric of her dress into her lap, almost as if the spider might crawl to her somehow with her skirts. Henry, on the other side of the schoolhouse room, knelt in his chair to try to see better. The oldest students had seen this before; some of them even seemed bored.

Ms. Dorell smiled down at Peter. "In this glass, Peter, there is a very dangerous spider. Its bite can fester in the skin and cause great pain. You have every reason to be afraid, and today it will live on your desk. Which of the three things do you think your blood is telling you to do?" 

"Um, I -- um --" Peter looked up at the list very quickly, his little body pushing against the wooden chair, hands holding onto his seat. "Flee?"

Ms. Dorell nodded. "You will stay right here in this desk, Peter. You will be careful and not knock it over. No one will bump it. It will stay in its glass, and you will stay in your desk. By the end of the day, it will not seem as scary as before. Your brain will adjust. It will get easier." 

Peter's eyes were still fixed on the glass. Ms. Dorell touched his shoulder. His eyes flickered up to hers. "It will get easier, Peter."

Ms. Dorell then checked back in on Nancy, who still had half her frock bunched above her knees. There were tears in her eyes. Ms. Dorell tutted a bit. Nancy must have been too young to remember the first time Ms. Dorell went through this lesson. "Let your skirt down, Miss Hutchinson," she said, tapping her fingers on Nancy's desk. "That is how we catch cold."

Nancy smoothed her dress down, uneasy. "It's not even on your desk," muttered Peter. Ms. Dorell let him get away with it, as she did somewhat agree. 

"It's okay, Nancy," said Jack Watson, whose large heart had already been through this lesson twice before. He reached over to pat Nancy's arm. "We'll all be careful. Pretty soon, you won't even think about it."

"Yeah, Nancy," said Baxter Martin, "you just have to get used to it."


End file.
